Where the good, the true, the human, and the real meet

In the second of his series on virtue, Andrew Davison explores the underrated virtue of prudence as the ability to live aligned with the grain of the universe.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A carving tool is pressed into a groove in wood.

Photo: Dominik Scythe on Unsplash.

A full human life is a virtuous one, and vice versa. In the second of these eight discussions of virtue, starting in Lent and moving into Easter, we come to the first of the virtues, namely prudence. It’s not a common word today, but you simply can’t have virtue without it, at least according to such luminaries as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Prudence, Aquinas recalls, is:

‘the mother, custodian, and moderator of the virtues.’

That’s because, for him, prudence is nothing less than the meeting point between the good, the true, the human, and the real.

'That to act well – to be virtuous – is to act rationally.'

Thomas Aquinas

Virtue, as we saw last time, is all about being fully and characterfully human. Human beings are ‘rational animals’, as Aristotle put it, so to be fully and characterfully oneself, someone has to act rationally, to the fullest extent that she is able. (This is also a tradition that has fiercely upheld the humanity and worth of people with disabilities, including mental disabilities.) There is something deeply counter-cultural about placing that sort of emphasis on reason. Isn’t fulfilment about following our desires, with rational interrogation just getting in the way? Moreover, we’ve lived through decades in universities where reason has been treated with suspicion (that’s the technical term), as ultimately an expression of power or some vested interest, such that ‘truth’ more about the speaker than what is spoken about. In contrast to that, Aquinas insists that to act well – to be virtuous – is to act rationally.

‘Reason is an openness to the reality of things’

Thomas Aquinas

That, however, is no cult of abstract or rarefied reason, nor the preserve of some intellectual elite. For one thing, while reason is important, it’s also secondary. Reason matters because of reality. To be virtuous is to live with the grain of how things are: with the grain of being human, of being in a human community, and with the grain of the universe more generally. The place of reason in virtue, according to Aquinas is not so much for its own sake, but because reason is an openness to the reality of things. Second, the rationality of prudence is a matter of keen-sightedness, especially in keeping two things in view, and coordinating between them: moral principles, and the contingencies of the situation to hand. Such clarity of vision is by no means limited to the highly educated, nor is primarily to be learned from books. It is picked up from good examples, and a well-honed common culture. Third, prudence is a virtue – a ‘second nature’, as we saw in the previous article – and that is as much about the honing of instinct, as anything else. It ends up as much a matter of the body as of the soul. It is about being a rational animal, so it shapes us as animals, and not only as minds.

To be virtuous is to be prudent – to be practically wise and rational – because of the need to attend to reality, and work with its grain, not against it. A good life is lived in a way that’s in-keeping with human nature, and with nature more widely, so as to flourish within it. That’s not simply a matter of living sensibly, although that’s also not a bad start, since living sensibly is also harder than we might think. We don’t naturally always make healthy use of the good things of life – food, sleep, sexual intimacy, responsibility, or authority – as good sense would suggest.

On fraught territory

The association of prudence with the reality of things, especially with the shape of human nature, is fraught territory. Human beings are prone to read all sorts of morally charged things into nature, some of them deeply flawed. Even the great Aristotle thought that some human races were ‘obviously’ and ‘naturally’ slaves. He also bequeathed the idea that human nature at its most authentic is male, such that women turn up when a foetus doesn’t develop along those, better, lines. All of that once seemed natural, which is a problem, but it doesn’t invalidate the place of prudence among the virtues, and the place of reason in a well-lived life. It makes careful use of prudence and reason all the more important.

On the good life

Reflecting on what a healthy, flourishing human nature is like, and a healthy, flourishing society, is a tricky business. That’s why it calls for life-long growth in the virtue of prudence: getting better at knowing what that looks like, knowing it more and more instinctually, and in being able to weigh up what it demands in any particular situation, rapidly in some cases. We won’t all agree on what a flourishing life looks like, individually or community, but there may be room for agreement in on the idea that a good life – a virtuous life – involves following that path, which is to say, the path of prudence.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

8 March 2024

4 min read

The Zone of Interest’s peripheral vision of evil

Director Jonathan Glazer bests Spielberg thanks to a quality of attention.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

in an immaculate garden a family play in and around a small swimming pool. Beyond the garden wall, a barracks is visble with crematorium smoke rising beyond it.

The Höss family at play at their Auschwitz home.

This has been a tremendously difficult review to write. I’ve written and re-written this review for two weeks now. You will see why.

The Zone of Interest begins idyllically. A family is picnicking by a lake. The men swim, the women pick berries in the woods. It's a gorgeous sunny day. The family happily drive home down an evocatively headlamp-lit country road. The father walks through their palatial house, turning off every light. The next morning the family are gathered outside to give the father his birthday present: a canoe. Two boys lead their blindfolded father gently down the steps from the house to the garden. The garden is magnificent: filled with flowers and immaculately kempt.

The father is wearing an SS uniform. The camera pans round the garden. Behind the garden wall you see glimpses of barbed wire, belching chimneys, rows of dormitories. You hear shouts, moans, cries, gunshots. This is no ordinary house, no ordinary garden, no ordinary family. This is the home of SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their five children. This is Auschwitz. Höss runs it. Hedwig runs their beautiful home. The children run around. That is the next 100 minutes of film. It's a realist family drama from the 1940s. The children are children, the wife is house-proud to a fault, and the husband is hard-working, ambitious, and keen to do a good job. I don’t want to say much more. You simply need to go and see the film.

When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil it was controversial. Many commentators misunderstood or misrepresented her point. Evil acts - especially an evil act as totemic as the Holocaust - are not ‘banal’. The people who commit evil on such a scale often can be. A genocidal machine of such scale and complexity needs a tremendous number of cogs… they can’t all be murderous sociopaths. Eichmann was banal in himself - he was of average intelligence, uncreative in his thinking, a follower of fads and joiner of organisations.

This is exactly how Rudolf and Hedwig are presented. Christian Friedel plays Höss with an almost continual ambience of low-level boredom. Pillow-talk with his wife, reading to his children, a discussion about the most efficient way to incinerate the Jews in his camp, is all spoken with roughly the same expression and tone. He clearly wants to do well in his work, but it doesn’t matter what the work is. Sandra Hüller gives Hedwig a marvelous, slightly nervous energy. She always seems to be keeping a combination of grasping envy and slimy smugness just barely contained beneath the surface of her features. She can’t think of much beyond the order of her house, the beauty of her garden, and her status among other SS wives. Their quality of attention is essentially absent.

Glazer has the maturity to recognise that looking directly at evil stops you from really seeing it.

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Not to be flippant, but they would be dreadful dinner-party guests, and not just because they are Nazis: they seemingly have no capacity for a thought that goes beyond themselves, and their immediate environment, and their immediate needs and wants. They are banal.

Between them Jonathan Glazer (director), Łukasz Żal (cinematographer), and Mica Levi (musician) give a remarkable demonstration of the power of restraint. The camerawork is naturalistic and almost never showy. The performers look like they were given the latitude simply to be in the scene: no over-direction. The soundscape is hauntingly bare. There is little music or sound beyond the ambient. The mood is, of course, set by the fact that the ambient sounds are roaring furnaces, gunshots, and desperate screaming. The film does not attempt to make a point or demand a response; Glazer simply gives you a slice of domestic life that just happens to be located next door to a death-camp.

Steven Spielberg has suggested this is the best film tackling the dreadful subject of the Holocaust since Schindler's List. He is wrong. The Zone of Interest is a far superior film. I love Spielberg, but Schindler's List is offensively bad. It takes a subject of such abject depravity and then tries to emotionally manipulate you into feeling bad: the music, the speeches, the more-is-more approach to showing you the pinnacle of human cruelty. Glazer has the maturity to recognise that looking directly at evil stops you from really seeing it. As Augustine says, evil is nothing in itself. Evil is the corruption and annihilation of what is good and lovely. Evil isn’t some great monster that forever battles with God. God is good…no…God is Good. So evil is literally nothing - goodness in decay to nothingness.

Glazer, whether intentionally or not, recognises this theological truth. Looking at the full abyssal nothingness of evil is beyond human comprehension. But if you see it in the periphery, then you see it. When you hear the screams of the innocent and at the same time see a woman cheerfully ignore them while she plays in a flowerbed with her infant daughter, then you recognise the potential for human depravity. You can’t truly encounter the nothingness of evil, and the dangers of letting its parasitical and destructive hunger spread, until you’ve watched others ignore it without missing a beat. I’ve never cried while watching Schindler's List. I cried while watching The Zone of Interest. Twice.

Glazer et al have done the world a great service with this film. They’ve reminded us that the weapon against evil is the rejection of empty banality. Banality is loving yourself. To reject banality is to embrace a quality of attention that is truly outward looking. Rejecting banality is loving your neighbour as yourself.